When discussing his new album After the Head Rush, Canadian proto-punk songwriter Art d’Ecco clarifies that the titular comedown refers to his experience in his late-thirties looking back on the vitality of his youth. While this serves as a theme to the forthcoming record, the latest single “Midlife Crisis” bluntly faces the new realities facing quote-unquote geriatric millennials beyond the savage nicknames bestowed upon them by younger generations. “The salad days are gone, if you will,” d’Ecco notes. “Time to get a mortgage, lose my hair, and swim in debt forever.
Contrasting with the playfully cynical themes of the song and the record it appears upon, “Midlife Crisis” itself is an energetic blast of new wave with its pop song structure unraveling halfway through its six-minute runtime in favor of an instrumental jam session. Meanwhile, the video portrays d’Ecco as someone who’s just returned home from a long day at the office, comically singing the track’s closing refrain while lying on the floor and staring off into the distance.
“Brandon William Fletcher is a genius—he shot, lit, directed, and edited the whole thing,” d’Ecco adds. “He’s a great filter for my ideas, and just ran with it. Our location was a remote wooded area off the coast of Vancouver. We lugged all the equipment there for a weekend and filmed it over the course of 48 hours. I wanted the band to look really tired, so we shot a lot of their scenes at 3 a.m.”
Check out the scenes below.
